Pick carefully wrote his plan to avoid flooding Bismarck and Williston, North Dakota, along with Pierre and Chamberlain, South Dakota, but intentionally flooded the entire productive acreage of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, some 155,000 acres, supporting 349 families of 1,544 individuals.

United States Secretary of the Interior Julius Albert Krug ordered compensation in the form of an equal amount of acreage on lesser lands, at-cost hydroelectric power for irrigation, grazing and watering rights for tribal cattle, and $5,105,625 in payment for lost lands.

[2] Forced to sign the Pick-Sloan Plan contract, George Gillette, leader of the Three Tribes' business council, openly wept.

Colonel Pick was assigned to the China Burma India Theater of World War II in October 1943, replacing Brigadier General John C. Arrowsmith as Chief Road Engineer.

Pick City, North Dakota, located by the Garrison Dam on the Missouri River was founded in 1946 and named for him.

Pick married Alice Cary, one of the founding members of the Sigma Lambda chapter of Kappa Delta sorority at Auburn.